Redefining Financial Planning: Julio Martínez Leads Abacum’s Rise on the Global Stage

Julio Martínez is the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, a company specializing in financial planning and analysis software for mid-market firms. 

 Abacum’s all-in-one platform enables CFOs to forecast revenue, plan headcount and account for unseen financial circumstances amidst tough macroeconomic headwinds. Under Martínez’s leadership, the company has expanded internationally, with its headquarters in New York City, and offices in London and Barcelona. 

 Before co-founding Abacum, Martínez had a career in finance and technology. In 2018, he attended the Stanford Executive Program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Abacum was founded to transform the FP&A function. What pain points did you and your team identify in traditional FP&A workflows that made you confident there was a real need for a platform like Abacum? 

Abacum is the product we wished we had ourselves. My co-founder and I spent years working in Finance, experiencing the very pain points our customers face today – slow modeling, scattered data, limited visibility, and endless spreadsheets or legacy tools. We built Abacum to help finance teams save time, plan with confidence, and make better decisions, faster. We set out to solve three fundamental problems.

First, most finance teams spend half their time manually cleaning data, fixing broken models, or chasing numbers internally. This often involves extensive data consolidation, reconciliation, and reporting, which can consume a significant amount of time. This is where inefficiencies and human errors emerge.

Second, most finance teams don’t have access to real-time data, making it near impossible to produce insights without them going stale shortly after. They’re stuck in fragile spreadsheets or outdated systems that are difficult to scale. There has been an explosion of business complexity recently (especially in the mid-market), increasing data scattered across various systems. Consequently, decisions lack clarity and confidence.

Third, as a result of the first two points, finance remains reactive and siloed, missing the chance to drive real impact where it matters most. Too often CFOs are left out of the strategic conversations – looped in after decisions are made rather than helping to shape them. This is not just inefficient; it’s a missed opportunity for the business.

Now more than ever, CFOs are expected to be agile, strategic, and AI-enabled. As such, modern FP&A solutions such as Abacum are no longer a nice-to-have but rather critical infrastructure that Finance teams are proactively seeking out.

How has the role of the finance team evolved in recent years, especially within fast-scaling tech companies, and how does Abacum empower finance teams to become more strategic partners to the business? 

Expectations for CFOs are higher than ever. In an era of economic uncertainty, increasing volumes of data, and rapid AI adoption, CFOs are under unprecedented pressure to act as the CEO’s right hand. They are constantly being asked to drive strategy, forecast with precision, and navigate changing conditions in real time.

Alongside this evolution, there’s also been a shift towards efficiency-first growth. Finance teams are now being challenged to deliver more with less. They’re responsible for spotting opportunities across the business while operating as a lean, strategic function themselves. FP&A has become mission-critical, and legacy tools simply can’t keep up. Every minute spent on tedious, manual processes is now a competitive disadvantage.

We automate manual, time-consuming tasks like scenario modeling, forecasting, and reporting, giving finance teams back the hours they need to focus on high-impact strategy. By consolidating disparate data into a single, always accurate and updated source of truth, Abacum ensures decisions are informed by the latest, most reliable information. This also allows CFOs to respond to shifting priorities and market changes in minutes, not days. Not to mention, because our platform is designed for both finance and non-finance users, we break down silos, enabling real-time collaboration and faster, more confident decision-making across the entire organisation.

When you put it all together, what you have is an incredibly powerful and flexible platform that transforms finance teams from executors into strategic drivers – helping them anticipate, influence, and lead the business.

Abacum emphasises collaboration and automation. In your view, what’s the ideal balance between human judgement and automated analytics in FP&A today? 

We believe that AI should serve as a co-pilot for finance teams, not a replacement. Agents are extremely capable of helping with certain automations and repetitive tasks, but strategic financial decisions require context, experience, and the ability to weigh nuance – all of which are beyond AI’s capabilities for now.

While AI can summarise trends, highlight anomalies, and even propose actions to fix a problem, it lacks critical judgement and is limited by its non-deterministic approach. To make AI more reliable and consistent, we need to build it on top of a solid mathematical foundation that ensures accuracy and predictability.

Even as the tech advances, its inability to understand context to the extent a human can makes it so a human in the loop is always required. There is a chasm between using AI to inform decisions and letting it make them for you. Finance is the department that deals in the most highly sensitive and confidential business information. While an AI-generated email with a typo wouldn’t batter an eyelid, an AI-generated error in tax reporting could be disastrous.

This is why finance professionals remain the ultimate decision-makers. Only they can bring the depth of critical thinking needed to guide the business. The introduction of AI doesn’t change or diminish this responsibility. What it does change is the scope and scale of what Finance teams can deliver.

With the rise of AI, how is Abacum leveraging or planning to leverage AI to enhance forecasting, scenario modeling, or decision-making within finance teams? 

Abacum Intelligence is our end-to-end FP&A agent. It acts as an AI-powered layer across the FP&A workflow, designed to multiply the impact of Finance teams. Our agent focuses on four key areas.

First, scenario modeling at scale. Abacum Intelligence can instantly create and compare thousands of forecast variations across multiple drivers, from churn to hiring to revenue shifts, so finance teams can see the potential impact of every decision before they make it.

Second, forecasting accuracy and anomaly detection. Abacum Intelligence continuously monitors data in real time, surfacing anomalies or risks and flagging them with recommended actions before they become costly mistakes.

Third, automated data reconciliation and classification. Finance teams no longer need to spend hours cleaning and tagging data. Our agent automatically consolidates, classifies, and enriches information from all connected systems, ensuring the data is accurate and ready for reporting.

Fourth, natural language Q&A. With our AI chat, finance teams can interact directly with their data to uncover insights in seconds. Ask questions like “What’s driving the increase in operating expenses this month?” and get clear, data-backed answers instantly. From there, you can create and compare multiple scenarios across drivers and run “What if?” analyses without the need to manually rebuild models.

At Abacum, AI isn’t an add-on or a future vision; it’s already woven into the core of our platform and shaping how our customers work every day. We’re continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to build the most advanced AI co-pilot for Finance teams.

As a CEO with a finance background, how do you approach building a company culture that blends technical innovation with financial discipline? 

My ethos is to lead with financial clarity by instilling a culture where every function – from Product to GTM – understands key metrics, ROI, and the cost of capital. Efficiency isn’t just for finance; it’s a mindset that everyone needs to have across the business.

From day one, I’ve prioritised efficient growth – challenging the team to grow pipeline and revenue without ballooning headcount. Tactically speaking, that means tying every innovation effort to a measurable business outcome, incentivising people to work smarter, find creative solutions, and proactively remove blockers. This fosters a company culture where resourcefulness and resilience are celebrated alongside the results.

The foundation of that culture starts with hiring the right people. I look for individuals who embrace change, take extreme ownership, and bring operational rigour to everything they do. Once they’re here, it’s my job to create an environment that allows them to thrive – where they can grow quickly, take on big challenges, and still maintain the lean, agile mindset that keeps us competitive.

We also use Abacum internally across the organisation to stay on top of our track our financial and operational KPIs (just like our customers do). This ensures every team is connected to the metrics that matter and is aligned on the metrics that matter. The result is a culture where technical innovation and financial discipline aren’t competing forces, they work hand in hand.

The FP&A software space is becoming more competitive. What differentiates Abacum from other players in the market, and what’s your long-term vision for the platform? 

The mid-market is under pressure like never before – operating across multiple geographies and revenue streams, facing fragmented data, and navigating global volatility. Legacy tools can’t keep up while newer solutions have struggled to scale and provide the functionality needed for high-growth companies. We’ve cracked those challenges and turned them into our moats – enabling Finance teams to implement our platform in record time without sacrificing the technical depth needed to handle the complexity of their business.

After our recent Series B funding round, we’re doubling down on our product and investing heavily in the following areas:

• Multi-agentic AI that anticipates business needs, proactively suggests actions, generates insights, and helps teams navigate complexity. 
• A powerful modeling engine with faster scenario planning to help prepare for the future in times of uncertainty. 
• A robust data layer that becomes a single source of truth, with the flexibility and integrations required to seamlessly connect with existing tech stacks. 
• Collaborative workflows that put finance in the driver’s seat by allowing the department to share insights across their organisation. 

But this is just the beginning – our product will continue to evolve to better serve our customers and further cement ourselves as the leading business planning solution for the mid-market.

What advice would you give to other founders or CFOs who are still relying heavily on spreadsheets and manual processes for financial planning? What’s the tipping point for adopting a solution like Abacum? 

Spreadsheets are great software and can be a good fit if business complexity is limited. However, spreadsheets are very difficult, if not impossible, to scale. They’re not collaborative, are prone to error, and can’t handle the volume or complexity of modern FP&A needs.

A few things happen when the capacity of spreadsheets reaches a critical mass and there’s a tipping point. Manual processes break down and finance can’t keep pace with business speed. Teams experience data accuracy issues or delays in reporting. There’s external pressure to prove financial discipline and readiness, especially ahead of a funding round or IPO.

When spreadsheet limitations start slowing decision-making and eroding confidence in the numbers, the shift to a platform like Abacum stops being optional and becomes essential.

The post Redefining Financial Planning: Julio Martínez Leads Abacum’s Rise on the Global Stage appeared first on European Business & Finance Magazine.